Labor Leader Ai-jen Poo Confronts ‘the Biggest Driver of Economic Inequality that Nobody Talks About.’ by Jessica Goodheart
December 7, 2023
Introduction:
(Capital & Main) Ai-jen Poo, a labor organizer and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, has been shining the spotlight on the crisis of care in the United States for almost three decades. She advocates for some of the nation’s lowest paid workers — those who tend to our children, the elderly and the disabled.
Last year, her efforts to shore up the country’s fragmented and underfunded care infrastructure nearly resulted in a multibillion-dollar federal investment. The infrastructure proposal President Joe Biden presented to Congress included universal pre-kindergarten, home health care for seniors and child care tax credits. But the Build Back Better Act did not make it through a closely divided Senate after having passed the House of Representatives.
Capital & Main spoke to Poo via Zoom about that fight and her ongoing efforts to bring more dignity to the working lives of caregivers and those who depend on them. Poo, who also directs Caring Across Generations, a national movement of caregivers and care recipients, conveyed a steady optimism about the prospects for large-scale federal investment in care work. “We are ascendant,” she said. State-level initiatives and grassroots campaigns led by home care workers are key to driving federal policy change, Poo said.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Capital & Main: Nearly everyone is affected by caregiving, regardless of who you are or your political beliefs. Have you been able to make this an issue that transcends politics?
Ai-jen Poo: There isn’t a room that I go into where people don’t have very immediate, very emotional stories about caring for a parent with dementia or a child with a disability, or just all the mom rage that’s out there. This is such a widely and a deeply felt issue across so many different segments of our population, and our electorate.
They Clean After Holiday Shoppers, but They Don't Get to Celebrate with Their Families. by Sarah Lazare
December 11, 2023
Introduction:
(In These Times) For Elbida Gomez, the winter holiday season is not marked by cheer or family time, but by an exponential increase in her workload — cleaning bathrooms and store offices, taking out the trash, mopping entrances and wiping up food from the floor of the employee cafeteria.
The 43-year-old mother of two says she is one of just two people whose primary job is to clean the Woodbury, Minn., location of Cabela’s, a big box store chain that sells hunting, fishing and camping goods. Foot traffic increases as patrons do their holiday shopping. Parents line up with their children to take a photograph with Santa Claus. The floor gets covered in chocolate, candy wrappers and footprints, and, once the snow comes, the store entrance is perpetually coated in salt and sand, she says.
“There is little time and a lot of work,” says Gomez, who has done janitorial work since she moved to the United States from Honduras around 15 years ago.
But in a sector where she is — quite literally — tasked with sanitizing the holiday experiences of other families, she is denied the opportunity to relax and rejuvenate with her own. Gomez does not get paid holidays from her employer, Carlson Building Maintenance, which is contracted to clean Cabela’s. Her vacation time is paltry, she says, and management has made it clear that she is discouraged from taking consecutive days off during the holiday crunch, when her labor is needed most. While her store is closed on Christmas, she does not get paid for this holiday, she says. And, crucially, she still has to work on Christmas Eve, despite its central importance to her family.
“In my culture, Christmas Eve is our day to celebrate. It’s a coming-together period where we make food, have family over and spend time together,” she says over Zoom, with the help of an interpreter. “And I’m going to work like it’s a regular day. It’s hard on the kids.”
After 18-Month Battle, Washington Post Union Wins Tentative Deal With Bezos-Owned Paper by Julia Conley
December 22, 2023
Introduction:
(Common Dreams) A mobilization by unionized Washington Post staffers that included a historic 24-hour strike helped push the newspaper to offer what the union described as "the best contract [it] has won in half a century" on Friday as it announced a tentative agreement with management.
The Washington Post Guild, which represents about 1,000 editorial, advertising, and non-newsroom workers, celebrated the breakthrough after 18 months of tumultuous negotiations, which pushed the union to hold a one-day work stoppage earlier this month.
Management had "refused to bargain in good faith and repeatedly—and illegally—shut down negotiations over key issues," the Post Guild said at the time, but executives were forced to reopen talks on Friday after an outpouring of support for staffers from the public and another action this week by staffers who plastered the newsroom's walls with readers' demands for a "fair deal."
(See linked article for Twitter feed)
"Though The Post spent the past few weeks insisting they had no further movement for us, our members' tireless organizing, and the public's outpouring of support, forced company leaders back to the table today," said the Post Guild.
The tentative deal reached on Friday includes an immediate $30 per week raise for all union employees, to be combined with a 2.5% raise that will go into effect in April and two 2% raises in 2025 and 2026. The salary floods for the lowest-paid union members will be nearly doubled by the three-year contract, according to the union.
When Immigrant Dairy Farm Workers Get Hurt, Most Can’t Rely on Workers’ Compensation by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel
December 22, 2023
Introduction:
(ProPublica) For most workers in Wisconsin who get hurt on the job, the state’s workers’ compensation system is there to cover medical expenses and pay a portion of their wages while they heal.
“One of the bedrock principles of worker’s compensation is universal coverage,” the state’s Department of Workforce Development, which oversees the workers’ compensation system, says on its website. “That means that virtually every employee is covered.”
But the law is different for farms, and many immigrant dairy workers — the backbone of one of the state’s most celebrated yet dangerous industries — don’t get this protection. Wisconsin exempts all kinds of farms with fewer than six employees not related to the owners from the requirement to have workers’ compensation coverage.
No state or federal agency appears to track how many of Wisconsin’s 5,700 or so dairy farms fall into that category — or how many workers go without coverage. Neither does the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, one of the state’s most powerful lobbying groups.
But the number of those farms is likely in the thousands since many employ only one or two workers. According to one national study, more than 23,000 agricultural workers in Wisconsin were exempt from workers’ compensation coverage in 2020; that’s a larger number of excluded agricultural workers than in almost every other state in the country.
Dying in the Fields as Temperatures Soar by Liza Gross, Peter Aldhous
December 31, 2023
Introduction:
(Inside Climate News) For most of July 2019, stifling heat hung over the agricultural fields of California’s Central Valley, as farmworkers like William Salas Jiminez labored under the sun’s searing rays. Temperatures had dipped from 99 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit the last day of the month, when the 56-year-old Puerto Rico native was installing irrigation tubing in an almond orchard near Arvin, at the valley’s southern edge.
Around 1:30 that afternoon Salas sat down to rest. When he stood up to go back to work, he suddenly collapsed. An hour and a half later, he was dead. Reports filed with the U.S. Department of Occupational Health and Safety, or OSHA, say Salas died of a heart attack.
Salas’ death certificate lists atherosclerotic heart disease as the immediate cause of death. But it also lists “extreme heat exposure” and obesity as significant contributors. Both heart disease and obesity increase the risk of fatal heatstroke.
No federal standard protects workers from extreme heat, though OSHA proposed a rule in 2021—a half century after public health officials first recommended precautionary measures. California was the first of the five states that have passed a heat exposure standard and its requirements are considered among the toughest. Yet the standard doesn’t recognize an increasingly dangerous threat for agricultural laborers in a warming world: working in hot, polluted air.
